World class power plant chooses Mainpac for better asset management

An asset management solution from Mainpac was selected by a major power plant in Sydney to better manage and maintain its assets for maximum equipment uptime.

Mainpac’s 2011 Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) software was chosen to provide better visibility into their assets and assist in achieving their goal of better management and maintenance of spare parts.

The Smithfield Energy Facility in Sydney, New South Wales owned by Marubeni Power Development Australia is a power cogeneration facility providing electricity and steam to customers including an electricity wholesaler and a paper manufacturer. With customers relying on Smithfield to provide uninterrupted service, the asset intensive operation with more than 8,500 assets needed a better way to manage and maintain its assets to maximise equipment uptime.

Major challenges for Site Manager Michael Heazlewood include keeping the plant running and staying on top of maintenance, covering both upgrades and obsolescence. Getting their routine and outage maintenance spare parts under control is one of the challenges they are working on this year.

According to Michael, to minimise costs and reduce the need for extensive storage space, the power plant keeps a relatively low inventory of spare parts, which is built up for planned outage periods as needed. These parts are used up during the scheduled maintenance, depleting their inventory again. The plant is also working on changing their maintenance approach to more of a condition-based system to extend the intervals between outages.

In order to extend maintenance intervals and effectively set and manage the overall maintenance strategy for the Smithfield facility, Michael needed a state-of-the-art asset management system that could be fully customised and supported locally.

Mainpac 2011 enables the facility to structure their view of their assets a lot better, which gives them a clearer picture of their maintenance operations. Following the implementation of the asset management system, the facility discovered they had approximately 8,500 assets where previously there was visibility only into about half that number.

Mainpac 2011 allows users to segregate and structure asset data to suit the organisation’s requirements. The flexible operational views can be arranged in hierarchies across multiple levels. It also allows users to define basic asset records including spare parts. Users can generate predictive and preventive maintenance work by recording the assets’ status, condition and criticality.

Michael says that Mainpac will allow them to strategically and effectively manage their assets, particularly from a maintenance and outage perspective. He particularly mentions the seamless migration and the simple system that they can customise and expand going forward. In future, Michael plans to use Mainpac 2011 to manage his purchasing system.

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